The problems with Trump’s strike on Syria

It is hard to see any master policy design behind the attack.

2017/04/16 Issue: 102
Page: 7

The Arab Weekly Tom Regan

If you want American media talking heads, liberal or conservative, to hyperven­tilate for your presidency, it appears you just need to blow something up, prefer­ably somewhere in the Arab world. Suddenly, you become “presidential” and every misfire, error and mistake is forgotten.

There is little doubt that Syr­ian President Bashar Assad is a butcher and his regime needs to go. So, on the surface, US Presi­dent Donald Trump’s order to bomb a Syrian airbase looks like a winner for him. It does not take much digging, however, to find the cracks in its foundation.

Until April 6, the day of the cruise missile strike, the Trump administration’s policy, if you can call it that, was totally hands off Syria. Trump was not interested in replacing Assad and there had been no expression of horror at the almost half a million Syrians who had been killed in the preced­ing years, including the “beautiful babies” who had died in horrible bombings or who had drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean to escape Assad.

In the past, Trump had suggest­ed that he believed many Syrian refugees were terrorists. While it is interesting to think that Trump was suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of humanitarianism, he has not changed his position on his Muslim ban that includes Syrian refugees, many of whom live in abysmal conditions. It is hard to see his concern as more than a hiccup in his emotional state. This was obvious in the inability of US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to explain the contra­diction in Trump’s position on US political talk shows.

Policy, what policy? We live in a complicated world. Leaders of su­perpowers — and the United States happens to be the only one — need a plan for how to deal with those complicated matters.

It is a somewhat disturbing idea that Trump will jettison whatever policies he does have every time he sees upsetting images on the White House TV. Did he think about how Russia would respond? Or Turkey or Egypt? Will one attack lead to more? The Syrians already have the airbase back in operation. Will he bomb it again to ensure it is not used again for a similar kind of attack?

It is hard to see any master policy design behind the attack, even with the sudden appearance of Rex Tillerson as the secretary of state.

In a different vein, but just as concerning, the US media’s reactions were problematic for America and the rest of the world. In times of conflict, US editors and reporters grow epaulettes. Almost across the board, the usual sus­pects on cable news TV fell over themselves to applaud Trump’s decision to bomb. Suddenly, air­time was filled with former gener­als talking about “strategy”.

It was déjà vu all over again. It was as if the American media had learned nothing from the long nightmare of their miscalculations and errors about the 2003 Gulf war and its aftermath. This attack raised more questions than solved them but the media were too busy being fanboys to dig deeper. (Jake Tapper of CNN was the only real exception.)

Years ago, a senior foreign editor at a national radio station where I worked told me to be careful of inside-the-Beltway journalists. “They are just a pack of lemmings attracted by bright shiny things,” he said of the media in Washing­ton. He was right.

Tom Regan, a columnist at
factsandopinion.com, previously
worked for the Christian Science
Monitor, National Public Radio, the
Boston Globe and the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. He is
the former executive director of the Online News Association and
was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1992.

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